Sebastian Villabona
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Sebastian Villabona is a painter who lives between Colombia and Sweden. He started out painting graffiti and murals on the streets of Bogotá. He then moved into a studio in Sweden, where the slower pace let him work things out over time. He studied graphic design in Argentina and did his MFA in Gothenburg. Villabona's paintings are abstract, with the city showing up in the grids and repetitions, and in what he paints about: how cities grow and push people to the edges. Lately he has started collecting fabric to move into textiles.
Q: You started out painting graffiti and murals on the streets of Bogotá. What changed when you moved indoors to a studio in Sweden?
A: Moving to the studio gave me the time to develop a more personal relationship with my practice. I could investigate what was important for me to express while exploring new materials and techniques within the studio environment.
I really appreciate this slower process of discovering what the painting can become. For me, the studio became a space where I can experiment and allow the paintings to reveal new possibilities through the process itself.
Q: Your paintings hold geometric and organic forms. What happens when these forms meet?
A: In my recent paintings, I'm interested in allowing these spaces to blend more. I see these encounters as spaces of ambiguity, where forms stop being what they were and begin to transform into something else. I'm not trying to keep them completely separate, I'm interested in how they change when they come into relationship with one another. Rather than existing as opposites, they depend on one another to create these dialogues.
Q: The city keeps finding its way into your abstraction. Where do you see it in the finished work?
A: The city and architecture have been present in my work through the geometric elements of the paintings. They appear in repetitions, patterns, grids, and structures that become part of the composition. But I'm also interested in the psychological and social dimensions of urban development. I'm interested in how it shapes the way we live, its impact on the environment, the consequences of city growth, and issues such as gentrification and the urban periphery. These concerns inform the paintings just as much as architecture's visual language. For me, the city isn't only an aesthetic reference, it's also a way of thinking about the systems that organize our lives.
Q: How do memory, power, ecology, and urban development enter something abstract?
A: For me, abstraction is a way of thinking through different relationships and structures rather than describing the world. Although memory, power, ecology, and urban development may seem like different topics, I see the subjects I'm interested in as interconnected ways of understanding how we organize and inhabit our environments and how those structures can be questioned, destabilized or transformed. The paintings don't try to illustrate those ideas literally; instead they construct a space where these relationships can be reorganized, overlap, confront, and remain open to multiple possibilities. Geometry, gesture, mark-making, texture, color, and layering become the visual language through which those dynamics unfold.
Sometimes the references are more visible, while in other works they remain more implicit, but abstraction allows them to exist without being fixed to a single meaning.
Q: You live between Colombia and Sweden. What does moving between them do to the work?
A: In recent years I've been living in Colombia again. But whenever I travel to Sweden, or return to Colombia afterward, each place offers a very different source of inspiration. The same happens whenever I travel to other places. I'm always interested in observing the different ways people live, their cultures, and the different forms that nature takes from one place to another. Inspiration is everywhere.
Q: You already work in painting, collage, walls, and sculpture. Is there a form you haven't tried yet that you want to?
A: Lately, I've been getting interested in working with textiles. I've been collecting different fabrics and thinking about how they can carry meaning, combining them with textures and interacting with images or photographs as part of a collage process. Working with textiles is definitely something I'd like to continue to explore.
